Alexandra Samuel's blog | Social Signal

Continued from Part 1: Why to Mac-ify

Here's how Mike told me to test whether I could get the netbook to run the Mac OS:

1. Format an external hard drive and attach it to your Mac.Insert the Mac OS Snow Leopard Installation CD into your Mac.
2. Launch the Snow Leopard installer; select the external hard drive as the destination for your installation.

Some people have a favorite pair of boots that make them feel like dancing. Other people feel like themselves with they pick up a special pen, or dive deep into a remote patch of woods.

A few months ago I wrote a blog post for Harvard Business Online about social media tools that can make business travel more effective – and thus, more infrequent. Ironically, I’ve done a lot more travel in the months since I wrote that post, since my kids are finally at an age where I can travel without (knock on wood! knock on wood!) everybody coming down with the latest virus.

I'm in Toronto today at the Getting to Uptake conference, convened by Sick Kids Hospital. The conference focuses on how social media can foster practice change in the arena of pediatric mental health by connecting practitioners with patients and with one another. In the desperate hope that I could get Sick Kids to return my tonsils and adenoids, I offered the conference an overview of social media and how it's being used in the health field.

Twitter has helped move my attention from the soapbox side of social media ("Here I am blogging about the Important Idea I want to convey") towards its conversational side ("What do you think about my Important Idea?") The short message length and rapid-fire pace of Twitter, combined with the panoramic view of my friends that I get from my Tweetdeck setup , fosters a more conversational online relationship with my friends and colleagues.

I was picking my daughter up from her first day of school, and I was so excited to hear how it went that got there a few minutes early. I could go in and spend a few extra minutes observing her class....or I could sneak one last peek at the day's e-mail. Sure enough, I pulled out my iPhone, only to experience that little ping of disappointment when the hoped-for e-mail from a prospective client had yet to arrive. I headed into my daughter's classroom, my excitement about the first day of school now dulled, ever so slightly, by the disappointment of that missing e-mail.

Twitter is home to many recurrent motifs, but one of the most reliable is the mass finger wag. Unlike the single finger wag, which takes aim at a specific individual or company ("Airline X lost my luggage!" "So tired of @username's whining!"), the mass finger-wag -- let's call it the hand-wag -- tackles an entire category of twitter users, an entire genre of twitter usage, or a swath of the offline population. Tweets like:

Not another Snow Leopard tweet! We've heard enough about your OS upgrade for one night.

The panel picker for next year's South By Southwest Interactive conference has just gone live, and zowee! there are some great choices. We're especially thrilled to see so many great social media panels proposed by interesting women speakers, promising a SXSW in which we get to hear some sopranos and altos mixed in with the basses and baritones that dominate so many tech events.

Here are some of the women panelists we're excited about (in no particular order). Some of them are women who have dazzled us at past events; others are new discoveries we made while digging through the wealth of awesome-sounding panel proposals.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote my most hypocritical tweet ever:

Follows are not love. You are as lovable with 5 followers as with 50,000. You are not your Twitter feed.